does the profession attract? How many are tuberculous? What proportions suffer from insomnia, obsessions, neurasthenia, eye-strain, headaches, heart-disturbances, indigestion, constipation, or other functional derangements? What constitutes overwork of the teacher, and what are its reflective effects upon the pupils? What is the status of personal hygiene practise among teachers? How many of them are in the "patent-medicine-stage" of ignorance? What fraction of them do not appreciate the difference between an oculist and an optician? Is it vain to hope that our half million teachers may yet be made so many missionaries of public health? If so, through what methods of teaching hygiene in the schools? How do different methods of teaching physiology and hygiene differ in their effects upon life habits? What is the best approach in teaching "scientific temperance," or the still more difficult subject of sex hygiene? Should the latter be taught in the public school? At what age? What should be the content of such instruction?
The greatest problem of conservation relates not to forests or mines, but to national vitality, and to conserve the latter we must begin by conserving the child. Let it again he emphasized that hardly a single one of the above questions is fully answerable to-day. Not many of them will be fully resolved until they have been attacked on a broad scale by systematic and scientific methods of research. To secure proper scope for such research the schools must be thrown open to it; to insure adequate support it must be made a public undertaking. The school instead of causing sickness and deformity must be made to preserve the child from all kinds of morbidity, repair his existent deformities, combat his hereditary predispositions and the bad conditions of his social environment, in a word fortify his constitution and render him physically and mentally fit for the struggles of life. The value of research carried on for this purpose will depend most of all upon the type of man intrusted with it. The teacher can not do it; the superintendent or principal can not do it; no more can the average school physician.
Who is the school physician and what has been his training? With a few notable exceptions he probably differs little from the average practising physician, and since the merciless brochure of Mr. Flexner it is unnecessary to dwell at length on the positive unfitness of the average physician for any research, to say nothing of the highly specialized kinds here advocated. Suffice to say that Mr. Flexner finds only about 30 respectable medical schools in the entire country; that twenty years ago there was not one; that a large fraction of our physicians "walked into the profession from the street"; that over one half the schools require less than a high school-course for entrance; that half or more have little or no laboratory facilities for physiology, pharmacology or bacteriology; that many do not even teach the use
